In some search technologies, when a user types a word, such as “Alamo,”into a query for a search engine or a relational database, then the engine may return a list of potentially irrelevant information as “relevant results” to the user's query. For example, the search engine may generate links to 1) a car rental company, 2) a town in Texas, or 3) a historical event based upon the word “Alamo.” The user is typically only interested in finding relevant links to only one of those categories of information. Relational databases exist where a user can specify a reference document and find relevant related documents to that reference document. A few relational databases exist where a particular field may be pre-designated by the author of the reference document to assist in narrowing a user's query to find relevant related material regarding the reference document. The pre-designated field typically summarizes the main ideas conveyed by the reference document as determined by the author of the reference document. The user of the relational database may choose to use this pre-designated field as the content of the query. However, these relational databases typically return a list of related documents based upon some form of exact word matching.
Some search technologies, allow a program to choose the query terms rather than a user providing these term. These text analyzing tools may be limited to analyzing meta tags associated with a document containing text. If the document is unstructured and has no meta tags then the text analyzing tool can not analyze the actual text in that document. Some other text analyzing tools may rely on the user to supply the key words or concept prior to executing a query to find relevant content. However, these search technologies may also return a list of potentially irrelevant information as “relevant results” to the user's query. The prior art technologies may generally lack the ability to allow the user to more narrowly target the desired related documents that the user wants to find.
Some search programs that are intended to supplement an active application in the desktop window with additional useful information actually interfere with the use of that active application. These behind the scenes search programs should provide links to additional related material to the content in the active window. However, some search programs may have interfered with a user's use of that active application by being obtrusive, which defeated the intent of working behind the scenes to augment the user's experience of using the actual application active in the desktop window.
The displayed search results may have been obtrusively displayed over a portion of the active application in a manner that interfered with the user's viewing of the text and other features of the application in the active window. Also, the displayed search results may have been merely tangentially relevant. Thus, user's time may have been wasted by being distracted from the project in the active window by being visually alerted to view merely tangentially relevant links. Both the filtering through of irrelevant links and the automatic obtrusive display of these links over a portion of the active application that the user may be trying to use may cause user frustration.